Knockin' on Heaven's Door: A Beautiful Companion to a Beloved Series

Cowboy Bebop: Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door—the 2001 feature film companion to Hajime Yatate (Sunrise/Bandai Namco Filmworks’ collective pen name, here shared by director Shinichirō Watanabe, screenwriter Keiko Nobumoto, character designer Toshihiro Kawamoto, mechanical designer Kimitoshi Yamane, and composer Yoko Kanno)’s 1998 TV series—is a marvelously vibrant picture.

A stand-alone longform story set late in the show’s run, Knockin on Heaven’s Door follows the oft-hapless-yet-skilled bounty hunting crew of the spaceship Bebop as they clash with created-for-the-movie villain Vincent Volaju (Tsutomu Isobe and Daran Norris). Vincent, an ex-soldier turned bioterrorist, has convinced himself that the world is naught but a dream he’s been trapped in since a disastrous mission to Saturn’s moon Titan. The only way out is to commit mass murder on Halloween—in his eyes, the one day a year when souls trapped in Purgatory can ascend to Heaven.

The Bebop’s crew—existential jeet kune do practitioner Spike Spiegel (Kōichi Yamadera and Steve Blum), guarded femme fatale Faye Valentine (Megumi Hayashibara and Wendee Lee), stern former cop Jet Black (Unshō Ishizuka and Beau Billingslea), odd ace hacker Ed (Aoi Tada and Melissa Fahn) and adorable ultra-intelligent corgi Ein (again Yamadera) are after Vincent, first for his ludicrously high bounty (the crew always, always need a win and never quite manage an unambiguous one) and then because he has to be stopped. Not only does Vincent have the skills and resources necessary to pull off an atrocity, but he’s also so disconnected from life that he barely feels anything, even when killing. If the world is a dream, then people are not people. They are but locks on the doors to the door that will lead to him finally waking up.

And that’s the trick. Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door takes full advantage of its longer form and extended production time to craft a vivid (despite a generally sedate color palette) Mars, one that persists beyond what the camera captures while following Spike and company. In addition to the picture’s major players—the Bebop crew, Vincent, his former-lover-turned-hunter Electra Ovilo (Ai Kobayashi and Jennifer Hale) and a few members of the show’s recurring ensemble—the creative team keeps their eyes on folks in the crowd, people living their lives for whom Knockin on Heaven’s Door’s events are something seen in the corner of their eye, or that briefly interrupts a regular day with minimal explanation.

A convenience store clerk Spike and Jet save (they capture the doofy crew who were robbing the store to spite the security company that sacked their leader) puzzles over a sudden rainstorm (caused by Faye holding the city’s weather control station hostage to spread the antidote to Vincent’s artificial plague faster than the vicious nanomachines can move). An unfortunate cabbie (Spike lands his space fighter right in front of him, hires him to get to the climax, and then literally walks out on the fare) remains caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic. The merchants of the city’s Moroccan market have wares to sell and trades to ply. And even in the 2070s, the decade the series is set in, kids love trick-or-treating and all things Halloween.

In montages (such as the opening and closing sequences, legendarily soundtracked by Yoko Kanno’s band SEATBELTS) and the course of Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, the creative team repeatedly showcase life on Mars (Cheers, Misters Bowie n’ Simm). Aside from a chance for the animators to flex (humans of all shapes, sizes, and colors on screen en masse), the picture’s focus serves two purposes. 1: It raises the stakes by giving the audience an opportunity to take in the lives and times of the folks Vincent’s scheme is endangering, to make them faces rather than a vague blob of offscreen innocents. 2: It contextualizes Vincent and the Bebop crew.

 Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door opens with Spike ruminating on Vincent’s intense loneliness. Murderous, nihilistic, and sadistic though he is, Vincent is not a giggling ghoul who delights in his heinous deeds. He’s severely depressed, which manifests in general apathy and a reserved affect—his rare moments of excitement come from executing one of the big steps of his plot or his violent encounters with Spike (in his existentialism a kindred foil), Faye (whose determination echoes someone lost to Vincent’s amnesia) and ultimately Electra (the someone in question). At rest, he exists in a near unfurnished apartment, his only hobby endless rounds of peg solitaire—a game he plays for the repetition, to mark the passage of time. His days bleed into each other, all save for Halloween (he picks up a spiffy warlock hat for the occasion).

Spike and company, meanwhile, may be hard traveling short-change heroes whose lives are out of step with everyday Martian folks, but they are awake and engaged. Frayed and transactional though their bond with each other can be, it is real. They’ve got friends and acquaintances, hobbies and fixations and histories. And while the series proper is the place to go for their longform arcs, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door takes the time to put the crew out in the world and gives them the space to bounce off each other. Lonely as they may be, they live. They use their time. 

While Vincent successfully detonates the bombs containing his plague, the Bebop crew ensures that his plan is overall, to paraphrase Robert Pattinson in Tenet, one of the bombs that doesn’t go off. Shot down by Electra, Vincent dies feeling more alive than he has in a long, long time. He remembers Electra, that she loved him and he loved her—and accepts that he was not dreaming. After so long in dreadful stasis, he can at last move forward. Electra herself can at last grieve Vincent and let him go.

As the antidote-laced rain sweeps Vincent’s plague away, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door closes on a montage set to SEATBELTS’ “Gotta Knock a Little Harder (which, full disclosure, may be my favorite thing Kanno’s composed next to the pop-rock epic “Sayonara no Tsubasa/The Wings of Goodbye ～ the end of triangle” from Macross Frontier.) The sequence follows Mars through and past Halloween. It checks in on the folks who’ve popped up here and there (the clerk, the cabbie, and company). It takes in interesting faces (including one guy who I’d swear is The Final Sacrifice’s Zap Rowsdower). It keeps an eye on the Bebop crew as their lives return to their normal, and closes on Vincent’s abandoned apartment—no longer a limbo.

Life, in all its ways big and small, goes on. It’s a lovely, cathartic piece of filmcraft and a damn fine way to end what is, by and large, a damn fine film.